Two Years and 20 Minutes Inside Biosphere 2

to travel back to or ninety two or so. But before we do that, let's talk about this concept of a utopia, a garden of Eden. This is this thing that we aspire to. Oh yes, I mean, this is an idea that has been with this rageous right that there perhaps was a primordial time, an untouched time, where everything was was perfect, and that we could maybe recreate that through some system, because it seems it seems like we have all of these flaws right in in in

human culture and human society. The way we do things, the way we interact with the world. It's it's inherently flawed. We're on this doom trajectory and there's got to be

something we could do to change at some order. We could put on ourselves, some technology we could we could aspire to something that would turn things around and save us from ourselves and maybe, depending on what your worldview is and you and and how you view your mythic history, return us to some uh, some previous mode of living that was pristine, yeah, replete with waterfalls, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, we could do that. We are of course talking about

biosphere too, which how do you explain this? I think about it as like this burning man fever dream, like let's put up an arc in the desert and create a utopia. But it's not, in fact a fever dream, or may be it was, uh one of the founders of this idea's fever dream. It actually came into reality in the early nineties and it served as this kind

of mini earth. Yeah, I mean, it was, in a sense kind of a scientific burning Man because because the you can certainly make comparisons between the the energy that that started each of these endeavors, and while one was what one was based in, uh in art and expression and have just having a big old party out in the middle of nowhere, the oh, there is a scientific endeavor. Yeah, and we're talking about this miniature air tight world that sprang up in the desert, and we're gonna take a

look at this in two episodes. Today's episode is going to focus more on the architecture and what happened during this experiment, um so. And we do want to mention that there have been other biospheres built before, mainly in the sixties and seventies by Russian and American scientists, but those really pale in comparison to the grand er that

is biosphere too. Yeah, the grandeur is key here because this was I mean, it was really a realization of ideas that had previously mostly been the domain of conjecture

and even science fiction. Like I instantly think back to n film Silent Running, where you had h all of the forest on Earth had been decimated, and you had and you had all the ecosystems of the Earth sealed off and self contained hemispheres in space looked after by Bruce dern in some Robots and and that is a really beautiful film with a strong ecological message, but it was very much science fiction. But fast forward a couple of decades and you see it actually take shape on

the Earth, and it is an amazing endeavor. It is. The project was originally conceived and executed by a group of adventurers, artists, and philosophers known as the Centergists, and they have the financial backing of Texas billionaire Ed Bass and oil magnet, and with that financing, they were actually able to bring this this idea to life. Yes. First of all, Ed Bass is one of two really key individuals for this whole project, because of course he had

the funds to make it happen. Uh, And he's really is one of these characters that also makes you rethink the term Texas oil billionaire because this is a guy you know that that was and is remains very active and environmentalist and philanthropic endeavors. But the other key individual, uh, the other guy that this could not have happened without,

is one John Allen. And we could really just devote a whole podcast that who wanted to to just analyzing John Allen because with this guy, you have a Colorado School of Minds trained metal orgist in Harvard NBA. All right, no big deal, uh, nineteen sixty three, he's uh, he's in a Manhattan office building. And the story goes that

this was following two hallucinogenic experiences with peyote. He looks out the window at this uh, this the sprawling metropolis, and in sees the air out there, and he realizes that he can't open the window to get to that air. He has this epiphany. Uh. So he quits his job, heads out and begins seeking wisdom around the world. Um. By ninety seven he's become a self styled esoteric teacher in San Francisco, and his students go to New York

and they set up a theater company. From there, they go to New Mexico where they start a commune near Santa Fe. And eventually he Eat meets add Bass, and add Bass starts listening to some of his ideas, and uh, and his ideas are really impressive. Yeah. I should also mention to you that that this group also has an oceanic research vessel. And all this time there they are trying in earnest to be rigorous about a scientific approach

to the environment. And at this time Alan really comes up with the basis of this idea of the biosphere. He says, quote, there is a crisis of misalignment between the biosphere and the technosphere. These seem to be out of balance a catastrophe. Biosphere too, instead creates a balance between biosphere and technosphere. In other words, he's going to try to use the technology and and the money here

that to create something of an artificial utopia. There's a great deal of interest with the synergists, who later redub themselves the Institute for Eco Technics, with not only understanding the environment but essentially bottling it up in the same

way that you have, uh, the idea of a bottled terrarium. Uh. And and this is of course, is is looking into the future, thinking about the long term survival of the human rights, thinking about space exploration, thinking about how do we take not just a little of our environment with us, How do we not just take uh, you know, a portion of it that we consume and it has to be replenished. How do we take a self sustaining portion of our world with us and and even see other

worlds with it. Yeah, this really was one of the missions of this project. And according to The New York Times in and they reported on it, the structure was builed as the first large habitat for humans that would live and breathe on its own as cut off from the Earth. As a spaceship. And again the idea was to to have this many atmosphere that could be portable eventually, but also to better understand Earth's biosphere or as the

biosphere Ian called it, biosphere one. Yes. Yeah, I also want to point out that at a at a conference in oracle In, Allan announced his plan to build a prototype Mars calling on Earth before the decade was out. And he and he he said that the destiny of human beings was to see Earth's life into space. In the first stop would be a working colony on Mars.

So these are some of the far reaching, ambitious ideas that were that were in the heads of John Allen and ultimately in the heads of those who, for lack of a better word, followed him and and and just bought into his vision. Now, let's talk about really where the rubber meets the road here when we're talking about this building. Okay, because so far we've been talking about all these sort of like esoteric ideas of utopia and biosphere and balancing. But what do you need in order

to do that? You need an incredibly huge structure. And from nineteen eighty seven to ninete this structure was built in the snore and desert about thirty miles north of Tucson, and we were talking about a seven million, two hundred thousand cubic foot sealed glass and space frame structure spread over three point one five acres massive. Yeah, and I should also add that the original idea is they built this thing to laugh. The idea was that rotating crews

would work here for a century. So one crew comes in, then the next crew comes in, and the experiment keeps

going and going. Uh. You know, in all this, I keep thinking that like one of the other only other minds that comes that comes to my mind when I when I think of vision, like this is Walt Disney, and we know we've talked about his plans for for uh, for Walt Disney World and especially for Apcot Center, and how ambitious, crazy ambitious those ideas were, and those ideas had to be rolled back to meet the realities of business. And with Biosphere too, you see a bit of that.

But they actually they actually got more of that vision somewhat accomplished, initially accomplished well, and we'll talk at a little bit about this more later, but there had to be an immense amount of excitement here because that's you know, initially the plan was thirty million dollars to build this,

but it took two hundred million dollars. With that kind of wallet open, you can see how a lot of people would be interested in jumping on this and contributing to it, because you are, in a sense, making history with this building and with this plan. And one of the things, one of the reasons why it was so expensive is because it had to emulate a closed system that was energetically open, much like Earth. Right, So in

other words, it's a materially closed system. So plants, for instance, biomass can't leave the system, but energy can, right, because whether or not it's heated or if it's absorbed um in other ways, it can move around in an energetic way. And that takes a lot of engineering, a lot of know how, and a lot of technology to pull that off. And it didn't skimp on bringing in great minds to work on this. It wasn't one of these situations where it's like a crazy guy building a pyramid out in

the desert. No, that they brought in some of the finest minds to help construct not only the structure itself, but then ultimately the environments within it. Indeed, I mean it really became this unprecedented research tool, a mini Earth as much as you could make. All Right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're gonna continue talking about the structure itself and the creation of the environments with it. We're back, all right, um

I I really love the architecture of Biosphere too. Yes, it's very beautiful. And if you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it recently, go visit our website. I'm going to make sure that we have a gallery there some really stunning images of this place, because yeah, it's it's a beautiful building. It's absolute retro futurist. It's got, um you know, the geodesic structures, those domes that are inspired

by Buckminster Fuller. It's got even sort of Moorish architecture to it as well, and some of the I guess you would call the lungs of the building. And it was designed by a company called Biospheric Design, and again they were influenced, um by all of the sort of sixties, seventy and eightiest retro future visions of what this glass beheam of could be. And to me, I kind of I even think about it as this futuristic crystal palace. Yeah, it really does have that kind of looked to it.

I I was looking at again, these images are fabulous and that you look at them and you see this place kind of like emerging out of the desert, but just emerging out of time. It's kind of it's it's unreal to to look at it. And it was built as the world's most air type building. It was designed to leak no more than ten percent of its air per year, and that is half the rate of the Space Shuttle. And it's stealed on the bottom by a stainless steel liner and on the top by steel and

glass frame structure. So it really does try to fit those parameters really tightly. Because again, this was sort of if you think about it, this was probably the thing that the entire project was hanging on, this ability for it to keep its energy steal. Right. Of course, all this glass is key because obviously we need it. Again, it's thermodynamically open, so we need heat energy energy from

the sun to actually enter through the glass. Yeah, in order to compensate for changes in air volume which should be caused by solar heating, right, the expanding atmosphere because of the heat and because of those alternating day and night temperatures, there were these large dome shape lungs that were constructed to deal with that expansion and make sure that the exterior didn't fracture to the point that the building would lose its integrity in the case of that

seal that we were talking about. And so in this seven million, two hundred thousand cubic foot sealed structure, how much air do we actually have in there? How much soil do we have in there? We have about hundred and sixty one thousand cubic meters of atmosphere with about seventeen thousand meters cubic meters of soil and about one million, five hundred thousand liters of fresh water, which doesn't even

account for this big ocean they put in there. Oh, yes, the artificial sea of biosphere to containing six hundred and seventy six thousand gallons or two million, five hundred and fifty five thousand, eight hundred ninety four liters uh and this was designed to be a coral reef reminiscent of the Caribbean and UH and just for future reference. And you can see this in some of the images that they were sharing on this the the ocean is situated between the desert in the rainforest. It's kind of a

buffer zone, a temperature buffer. Yeah. So we've thrown all these statistics out at you, and I think you guys all have a good idea of how massive the structure was.

But just imagine yourself on a cliff. Okay, Like you look above you and there's this glass dome, and you're on this cliff, and you're now looking over at a eight hundred fifty square mile coral reef, a four hundred fifty square mile mangrove marsh, a nineteen hundred square mile Amazonian rainforest, hundred square mile savannah grassland, and then oh sure, I'll take a fourteen hundred square mile fog desert. Yeah that sounds good. Oh, in a little tropical agriculture system

with a farm, in a human habitat with living quarters. Yeah, that's right, because you have the whole agricultural section as well. By the way, that rainforest um that was designed by Sir Gillian Prance uh then director of the New York Botanical Garden and uh as far as the the ocean area is concerned. I was designed by Walter A. D a geologist at the Smithsonian Institute. Yeah, and there's a

waterfall in there. It's absolutely gorgeous. And if you look at some old footage of some of the Biospherians talking about their experience, they well, I'll say it was beautiful. Like That's the thing that stood out most to me is just how incredible this environment was. Yeah. I mean you look at these images and it's it's kind of like silent running, except more fabulous. Like it's more amazing looking than some of the sci fi visions that came before it. It's it's on par with Wonka Land, except

that the waterfall is not chocolate but water. And we'll come back to to Wonka in a bit um. And you know, it reminds me a bit too. If I remember when I was a kid, my family would go up to the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, which has these big I've been there, right, Well, you know they have the big enclosed gardens, but but it's not really closed. It's my no means of biosphere. But I remember walking through it and like sort of imagining that I was

in a spaceship. It's a little like that. Yeah. Um. And this is pretty amazing too. It it had something like three thousand documented species of plants and animals across its five biomes. So we're talking about everything from scorpions to microbes, to coral reefs, to crops and pests. Yeah. I mean, they really tried to represent actual ecosystems here, not just a situation of viol let's have some goats to milk, let's have some some chickens to eat, you know,

or anything like that. It was let's have actual ecosystems. These need to be. These need to be the world in small Yeah. And if you have any doubt about the breath and depth of this project, consider that some of these species were grown in greenhouses, but some of

them were trucked in as entire landscapes. And you had swaths of tropical rainforest sampled from Venezuela savannah, from French Guiana, desert from the Baja Marsh, from the ever Glades, and at the suggestion and left us of william S Burrows, bush babies were introduced to supply companion primates. I did not I did not run across that in my notes that William S Burrows actually contributed to this project. Sure,

he weighed in it on as well. You want his name on the credits list when the scientists start pulling things apart later on, right, that's gonna help. Um. Now. Jane Poyter, who was one of the biosphereans, and we'll talk a little bit more about her later, she said that they called it their Garden of Eden on top

of an aircraft carrier. And that's an app comparison, I think, because the the infrastructure required, the technology required for all of that, for all these these ecosystems to thrive within

this contained environment, is pretty extensive. Yeah, because when we're talking about that structure below it, we're talking about twenty six air handler units in the basement of the technospheres they called it, that had the ability to heat and cool air and create condensate water for biospheres tooth and rain and fog atmospheres. Yeah, underneath you had mazes of pipes, events water tanks, a huge, huge empty vaps that we

used to process human waste. Um. Yeah, but of course the cooling system because you're having to you're trying to keep a sealed greenhouse cool in a desert um and that requires a great deal of energy. So it is it's like an aircraft carrier, were the infrastructure beneath the this magical sci fi eten and you've got electrical power supplied to the biosphere from natural gas energy center, which is located outside of biosphere too, through air tight penetrations.

Just in case you were wondering how that was happening, but still you can you can argue that, I guess it's geothermically it's geothermically open, so so that's allowed. All right, So now you have an idea of eating on top of this aircraft carrier. We're gonna take a quick break and we get back. We're going to talk about life in the biosphere. All right, we're back, and yes, indeed,

life in the biasphere. Instantly, when you think about Biasphre two, you can't help but focus on the human aspect of it. Those eight individuals that actually went in dressed in their kind of star trek looking uniforms and gave some wonderful speeches before they did too, and and then had to live in there, had to work in there and roll with some of the difficulties that ended up popping up. Yeah,

night to ninety one. They enter for two years in twenty minutes, as Jane Pointner says, and uh, all eight of them hung out together. We're talking about Jane Poytner,

who was the lead scientist. There was Roy Walford, a doctor who studied restricted calorie diets, Tkayror McCallum, Linda Leah botanist, Abigail Ailing, a marine biologist, Mark Nelson who was in charge of the waste recycling systems, Mark von Telo who was in charge of those machines, that technosphere, and then Sally over student Stone who was the captain of them all. And this was not the first time these individuals met.

This was a close knit group. They were all biosphereans. Uh. They were they were all very much in line with the ideas of John Allen uh and UH and they had been engaged in this and work leading up to this. So it's important to know that these these were not just chamos taken off the street. That while some of them may have engaged in theater in the past, these were not just It wasn't a theater troupe that was

thrown into this. Uh. This Eden on an aircraft carrier. Uh. These were individuals who were very invested in the idea and had varying backgrounds that befitted someone that was going to live in a biosphere for two years. Yeah. And you know, if this were a theater troupe that was just thrown in there, as the media kind of tried to pretend, you know, they wouldn't last for more than twenty four hours. And I'm not saying anything against theater troupe. I'm I'm one of you guys out there, um, one

of of us. But because we can't help, you know, Big Brother, the TV series Reality Sensation, when we think about this, because that idea was inspired by biosphere too, So we think about individuals thrown into this environment. We think of instantly think about interpersonal conflict and people who don't know each other having to deal with each other.

And I'm not saying that actors have a lot of interpersonal but I'm saying there's a huge psychological element to this, and that all those biosphereens had to be ready for this, and they trained for this in various ways over the two years um that this was being put into place, and some of them and I believe it was Pointner in perhaps Sally's silver stone. They also did some some closed system trials and lived and tried to work in

smaller environments to get themselves ready for this. Yeah, and by and large, all these individuals went on after biosphere to continue to work in in in related areas UM. You know, for instance, Mark Nelson continued to work in UM in watershed management, environmental engineering. Uh, you know, they all stayed within their their wheelhouses. So these were people that were invested long term in the disciplines that brought

them to buy it through the biosphere. Yeah, particularly Jane Potner, and we can talk about her later, but she's done a lot of work in the fields of environmental science and space exploration. But so, all right, you get a group of people together, you they're all working together, they're fine, but you know, they have to deal with the basics, right, like food, and this is where things get a bit dicey in the biosphere. All right. Now, keep in mind that if you you want a pizza in the biosphere,

you're gonna have to make it from scratch. And we're talking about taking the seed, growing the seed, threshing the wheat, um feeding your goat, milking the goat. So, as Jane Pointner has said, um in some of her talks, if you want a pizza, it's going to take four months. And I think that gives you an idea of the kind of challenges they were up against in producing their own food and maintaining it. Yeah, I believe the original estimate was that they would be able to grow eighty

percent of the food they needed within the biosphere. Um. And and even that was it was pretty ambitious, considering that they just had about a half an acre to grow all this food that they're they're not using pesticides, they're they're having to do all the work themselves. But but then, but before they launch, uh, the management decided, well, isn't gonna cut it. We need to and to make up for that, we're gonna put everybody on a calorie restricted,

low fat, nutrient dense diet. Yes, it's just sensible, right, I mean, because if food is an issue, well, then we're gonna we're gonna cut back as much as we're we're pushing the envelope on our ability to produce it. And a lot of that has to do with the types of food that you can grow at that point, right, and managed to grow. And when you're thinking about the food again, you had mentioned there are no pesticides or herbicides here, so that makes a little bit more difficult

to produce this food. And the reason why there are no pesticides and herbicides is because those chemicals would have affected the air quality. Because although this biospheres atmosphere is really large, right, it's small enough where those toxins would have built up really quickly and had a very negative effect on the health and well being of everybody inside. I mean, those agents are are problematic for the world in large when you're dealing with the world and small

even more so. Again, this is why this is such an amazing experiment, because you are saying things at a microcosm of of the macrocosmic world. And so when you're looking at that first winter, you have al Nino in effect, and that means that there's an unusual amount of cloud cover in southern Arizona, and that is contributing to unexpectedly

low food production. Yeah, less biomass production, less food. And then on top of that again no pesticide, no or beside, so you're in having to actually deal with mites and diseases cutting into your crop production. You don't get that pristine modern agricultural hall out of this. Yeah, and then you've got chickens who are failing to produce sufficient numbers of eggs, and they and the pigs are consuming a lot of the resources. So the biospherians decide that they're

going to slaughter the farm animals. Now keep in mind too that um you know, call calling back maybe to an older episode of Real Wilding in which we talked about the cascade effect. Once you remove one species, well, it's a domino effect because so you can only imagine, and this only three thousand species wide world, that if you take out some of some of these elements, some of these animals and these plants they're dying off, then that's going to affect everything else. Yeah, because cycles are

key here. You need you need the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, just the basic add and flow that is there's central to Uh. The success of the biosphere needs

to be in place in biosphere too. And when things start falling apart, uh, the center cannot hold nicely done, yes, and indeed the center cannot hold and food becomes an issue, and there are rumors that maybe the biospherience are smuggling in food, especially when Jane Poytner accidentally slices off the tip of her finger and she has to leave the Biosphere, which is another big kerfuffle, right because we've left in um and when she does leave it, she returns with

a double bag, which people say, I bet that's full of bags of Cheetos and in ho hoes and whatever else. Yeah, and I mean she apparently it was not. She claims it was not. It was apparently she just said with some drawings and circuit board something that to that extent um. Yeah, the media was really invested in this, and this wasn't even our modern our news cycle. I mean, imagine if they did bios, if Biosphere two had taken place during

the age of Fox News. I I cannot even imagine the field day they would have had with this, because because everybody was really into this, it was ambitious project. You had what you had these well meaning, uh you know, kind of hippie science guys and gals going into this thing. And then you begin to see shortcomings happening. You begin to see, uh, things like this person leaving and come again with a mysterious bag. So there's all this room to go, oh, what are they doing there? There? They

don't know what they're doing there there. The system is flawed and and then that the schaden Freud effect kicks in and you get to set back and uh and and have a hearty laugh at this whole project. Yeah, keep in mind that there were a ton of people that were outside of the structure looking in because again we're talking about glass, and they would observe the bio

experience and this was like a big deal. There are a ton of people that were really interested in so it's a human zoo and they look in and what do they see? But the bio experience are beginning to turn orange? Yes, And I kid you not, it sounds like it just made that up. Oompa Loompa's to return to Willy Wonka. And that has everything to do with their diet, which was largely sweet potatas. Yeah, of their

diet the first year it was sweet potatoes. So we're talking about a lot of beta caroteen, right, and of the fact they consumed was from bananas, and so yeah, as as a consequence there can began to turn orange can you imagine, you know, I'm sure the media was like and now they're turning into Pompa's. It's difficult. It's difficult to imagine becoming sick of sweet potatoes, but I'm sure it would happen. And it's difficult to imagine turning

orange because of eating too many of them. But you well, and that becomes one of the problems here under the biosphere is that you've got that limited calorie restricted diet. You have decreased i would say mental health as a result, because there's some depression setting in. Um. Here are some statistics. Men lost sixteen of their b m I their body

mass index in six months, women lost eleven percent. Their average systolic blood pressure decrease from a hundred nine to eighty nine, and their distalic BP decrease from seventy four. So these are some pretty big changes happening in their bodies. Yeah, and you know, the sources we're looking at didn't really

go into this as much. But we've talked about what happens when an individual is is cut off into a solitary confinement environment and this is a rather sprawling complex, so it's not you know, one to one with someone being in a tiny cell, but still they're engaging with the same place and the same people every day, day and day while rolling with with with this calor restricted diet, with problems with their food supply and other issues that will get into. Yeah, and Pointner says that they became

pretty obsessed with food, or at least she did. And she actually has a book called The Human Experiment two years in twenty minutes inside Biosphere too, and she talks about watching a film right yeah, and and the united she find herself not even focusing on the plot or the characters. It's about what they're eating, you know, because you put yourself in that those shoes, imagining yourself, you know, feeling this hunger, and and there you're watching, you know,

a food fight and a big comedy. That's the way I'm imagining it, that it's like classic Hollywood food fight and they're just like, throw that pie at me. This next description, I think is it's kind of pathetic. She says, sometimes we lined up in the second story windows of the habitat and took turns peering through binoculars at fat people. And then she says, for everyone seemed to overweight to us. Then even the slender people who were spurting catch up

on sausages and shoveling them into their mouths. We were culinary voyers. This reminds me of old cartoons where you know, you'd have the one character would be starving on the desert island and they look at the other one and they start picturing a big ham hawk and yeah, yeah, yeah, and it seems like that is in a sense sort of what's happening. And moreover, they just they're not is uh, you know, energy felled this they might be, and so

the tasks that they have to do take a lot longer. Yeah, because there's a lot of work to be done because again growing your own food, dealing with the animals, maintaining the environment, keeping records, and then just just day to day toil. And you're having to do all of that while rolling with these with this shortage of nourishment. You're right,

it's like extreme farming. And also you have to to keep in mind that the carbon dioxide levels were rising, so they were continuously harvesting in sequestering biomass or plants all over the facility so they can control that or try to And then they would shovel and scrape carbonate off their homemade natural CEO to scrubber. So keep that in mind with just the regular things that they were having to do just to survive. And one of the things are having to deal with your is just the

unpredictability of the physical environment. I mean that's the thing about biosphere too. And again keeping in and keep in mind, it was such an ambitious project, in such a large, sprawling project, again trying to to take the ecosystem, larger ecosystems and contain them and manage them within an enclosed environment. It unforeseen consequences are going to take place, things you couldn't possibly think of. So, for instance, they had to

deal with a cockroach explosion, their cockroaches everywhere. Crazy ants are invading from the outside. They're breaking through your space shuttle a ceilant to to get into that environment and start causing havoc. Yeah, they eventually did um cross the silicone seal that was eventually penetrated, and so then you have two different biomes uniting with each other, right, which you know would obviously affect the integrity of the experiment.

Um As you said, they have the cockroaches, they those on night duty have have the dubious task of collecting those cockroaches and other environments and uh feeding them to the animals, because again, that's a resource they can't waste. That there's some food for the animals that they don't have to go out and collect for themselves they're harvest Hey, guys, I really need that key to the banana room because

I think the cockroaches might be getting in there. Well, that's the thing that, by the way, we failed to mention that that the only locked room in the Biosphere two was the banana room because apparently the scent was such a siren smell to all of everybody on these restricted diets that they had to lock cut up to make sure people didn't get up in the Meanwhile, morning glory vines are overrunning all of the other plants, including the precious food crops yep, and fish too many in number.

They begin to die off, and that's partly because there's a phosphorus trapped in the water system. Yeah, the phosphorus cycles out of whack. Yeah, and then those fish start

to clog the oceans filtration systems. Another unforeseen circumstance lack of wind resulted in the trees not developing stress would to cope with mechanical stress, so they were brittle and prone to collapse, which actually later on and we'll talk about this in another episode, really helped to inform people about ecosystems and how important, uh you know, trees and tree canopies are and how they interact with the environment.

As I mentioned before, nitrous and phosphors cycles are disrupted, the nitrous oxide levels actually end up growing high enough to reduce vitamin B twelve synthesis to a level that could impair or damage the brain. And meanwhile a third of the flora and fauna wind up just going extinct in the biosphere too, including most of the vertebrates and all of the pollinating insects. So again, collapse, more and more collapse is spiraling out right now, the death knail

perhaps to this whole endeavor. And keep in mind of laughing cas nitrous oxide is tasso, which can crazy, right, you have a loss of oxygen. So initially it was at which is roughly the same Earth's right, but it drops to four and Pointner says it was like playing atomic hide and seek. They could not figure out how they were losing it. They lost seven tons of oxygen, and it turns out that that oxygen was reacting with

the concrete structure. So that was sart of siphoning it off and leading to gradually and continuously lower levels, so much so that the biospherians were getting really groggy, they had sleep apnea, they couldn't complete sentences, and so finally, um, this we need some outside help for this, which caused quite a fracture. Yeah, because ultimately reached the point where, hey, to keep going, we need outside air, we need we need oxygen pumped into biosphere too. Otherwise when we've gotta

we gotta crack, we gotta crack a window. And essentially that's what they're doing. They're kind of reaching the point where you're saying, let's go ahead and crack the window. Um by letting by letting in a shifted in oxygen, it was brought into the form of a liquid oxygen. And this is one of those things that happens during the course they're two years that really ratchets up this

idea of idealism versus science. Right, So, so essentially you have two groups that disagree on how to manage things, and you can understand how this fracture just causes were more squabbling, right, because again, everyone's hungry, everyone's sluggish, everyone's been been stuck in there this long. And meanwhile they're also they're also outside stress issues to consider because originally this whole thing was budgeted at thirty million, and it

had already cost or reported two hundred million. So so there was a financial aspect of this as well. Right, So it's not just the eight of them making these decisions autonomously. Autonomously, I want to add, you know, you have the management outside. You've got John Allen and others who are trying to control this, whose money and vision are ultimately at stake in this uh, in this endeavor, right, and this kind of adds to those two different factions

or those differences on how things should be managed. So just consider this, for the last fourteen months of the mission, the eight crew members, would you know that the two different groups would not make eye contact or speak to

each other unless absolutely necessary. Now I do that if like a meeting goes more than twenty minutes here, it works, so I can't really blame them, But imagine for two years, you know, and imagine this too, that's like losing half of your social sphere, right, So think about half of all your friends just evaporating. Now, think about you being in that biosphere with four people you like and four

people or three people you like, and four people you hate. Yeah, and like a deep personal hatred, the kind you can only have for someone after you've you've worked really closely with them and and and this, and shared vision with them and then had a big falling out and we're unable to escape their presence. Yeah, awkward every single day. So apparently one of the crew set up funding for psychological monitoring and counseling ahead of time. But this experiment

was rejected by management. And we'll talk a little bit more about this, but some of that is tied to the idea that this wasn't the most transparent of projects. That being said, they stuck it out and the the eight crew members all emerged alive through the airlock in September three, though in two separate groups of four uh, not speaking to each other. Everybody was grumpy. Everybody was probably ready to hit the nearest buffet. But but they they did. They stuck it out. They made it to

the end of the experiment. And that's something I feel like to keep in mind through all this, despite all the flaws which we'll get into. I mean, an experiment in its essence is not a thing where you set out to necessarily reach that success point. It's about two and you learn from the failures of the experiment as well. You learn from the the the unforeseen consequences of the experiment.

And this was a sprawling experiment. Yeah. Pointer talks about this too, and her Ted talk like this was unchartered territory, no one had ever done this before. Of course there would be failure. Um. So we'll talk more in the next episode about some of the stuff that actually spiraled out of it that was really advantageous um. But I think for now it's probably worth mentioning at After this,

this phase one of the experiment closed out. It was largely ridiculed as this kind of I don't know performance, Aren't this quasi science? Yeah, I mean there were so many moving parts through this, so many people involved in it. Um. There there's plenty of areas to pick away at this, at the structure of the idea. Because we mentioned the CEO to Scrubber, which is a controversial issue that was supposedly sort of secretly installed, which which you know, there's

a there's an X on the checklist there. Then there's the oxygen having to be brought in. There's that bag that probably had Twinkies in it that came in. Um, there's a there's a criticisms about the the scientific pedigree of the individuals that were placed in their criticisms about the oversight, criticisms about the record keeping. Um. And then you start dipping into the history of the Synergist as well, and people start saying, well, this sounds a lot like

a cult. So you're basically have like theater trupy, you know, environmental cult members and Star Trek uniforms going into this thing. How can we take any of it seriously? Well, especially when you consider that the founder, John Allen, his pen name was John Dolphin, Johnny Dolphin. That really helps there. Uh yeah, I mean Dolphins and Space and John C. Lily and I mean, yeah, we touched a little bit about Alan. That is just a character very much a

charismatic leader of a movement with lots of ideas. Uh. And if you if you were to say, hey, kind of sounds like a cult leader. You know, maybe you wouldn't be that far off the off the track. Well, even know we're discussing this earlier. It's probably if it was is a cult, it's probably the most productive cult in the world. And you've got to look at this thing and say, Wow, the fact that they were able to come up with us and energize and mobilize enough people to do this to pull it off to some

degree is pretty amazing. Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, uh, the energy of occult tends to to go astray. But in this case, the centergist really got a lot of things done even before biosphere too. And granted they they benefited from some terrific funding as well, but uh, but yeah, they Maybe the thing here is that if you're if you're gonna do a big project, like there's really a megaproject, uh, that that kind of skips ahead of some of the phases.

You know, It's not like they didn't build a mom and pop biosphere. They built an epic biosphere. Maybe you need the energy and guidance of a cult like structure and a cult like energy to reach that point. So maybe there should be like a NASA cult formed to create the momentum. Yeah, I mean maybe, I mean, certainly I could see where it's it's two sides of the same coin. It's like, how do you want to get

to to that point? Do you want to go with something that's rigorously scientific but also um, you know, um adheres to the limitations of politics? Well, where do you go with like blank check uh funded cult? I don't know. I think that's what's so exciting and frustrating about this project is because you could see it had legs. You could see where it might have if if it had oversight, if it had had transparency and um and the management was a bit different. Let me put it that way.

You can see how this thing could have created, um, some very intentional studies, long term studies. That being said, there was still plenty of accidental science that came from this, and we'll talk about this in the next episode. Indeed, if you could have possibly combined the sensibility of the synergist movement with a more rigorous structure, a little more NASA in there, uh you know, along with the funding, who knows what we could have we could have achieved

with this. But as again, as we'll discussed in the next episode, we really did get a lot out of Biosphere Too. Uh, even though at the time it is very much discussed as a failure. At the time, Uh, it kind of became the laughing stock in the media towards the end. Um, despite all of that, Uh, there was there's a lot of good that came out of this. Indeed, And if you guys are interested in looking at some, um, some documentaries on this, I want to recommend the New

York Times. They have a documentary that's like twelve minute long documentary. Yeah, it's called Biosphere Too, an American Space Odyssey. And then there is a documentary about the actual building of Biosphere Too called Well Apples Grow on Mars. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, I mean, Biosphere Too is something that will be in the history

books long term. It will come a time when this is very much at least a bullet point, a very strong bullet point in uh the history of humanity as we uh explored more about how our world works and attempted to take it beyond Biosphere one. I agree. I think it is only now beginning to get its due. Uh. So there you have it. Hey, In the meantime, while you're waiting for episode two on this topic, head on

over to stuff to blow your mind dot com. That's where you'll find all of the episodes we've ever done. You'll find blog post videos, and you'll also find a gallery of Biosphere two images. You'll probably find that linked on the front page, but also the landing page for this particular episode will include that link. And if you have some thoughts on this on biospheres or living in closed systems, maybe you have submitted yourself to one let

us know. You can email us at below the mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com